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·Transfa Team

What Are Payment Lanes on Tempo?

Payment lanes are dedicated blockspace on Tempo that guarantee throughput for TIP-20 stablecoin transfers, even during network congestion.

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Payment lanes are dedicated blockspace on Tempo reserved for TIP-20 stablecoin transfers. When the network is congested, payment transactions are never crowded out by general-purpose smart contract execution. This is a protocol-level guarantee, not an application-level optimization.

How payment lanes work

Tempo classifies transactions into two categories:

  • Payment transactions: any transaction where the recipient address starts with the TIP-20 prefix 0x20c0. This includes transfer(), transferWithMemo(), and other TIP-20 operations.
  • General transactions: everything else: contract deployments, DeFi interactions, governance calls, etc.

The classification is based purely on the transaction's to address. No state lookup is needed, which means classification happens before execution with zero overhead.

Each block has a total gas limit of 500M, with 30M gas allocated to the general execution lane. Payment transactions get their own dedicated allocation that doesn't compete with general transactions for blockspace.

Why payment lanes exist

On Ethereum and most EVM chains, all transactions compete for the same blockspace. During an NFT mint or DeFi event, simple USDC transfers get priced out or delayed because they're bidding against high-value transactions for the same gas.

Tempo's payment lanes eliminate this problem. A stablecoin payment settles in ~0.5 seconds regardless of what else is happening on the network. For payment applications (payroll systems, merchant settlement, remittances) this predictability is a requirement.

What counts as a payment transaction

The rule is simple: if the transaction's to field is a TIP-20 token address (starts with 0x20c0), it goes through the payment lane. This covers:

  • Direct transfers (transfer, transferWithMemo)
  • Approvals (approve)
  • Minting and burning (mint, burn, mintWithMemo, burnWithMemo)
  • Any other call to a TIP-20 contract

Transactions that interact with TIP-20 tokens indirectly (for example, a DEX contract that internally calls transferFrom) go through the general lane because the to field is the DEX contract, not the token.

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